Bribery? The dollar figures on that website aren't literal dollars being handed over to elected representatives. They list what the companies pay lobbying firm. Lobbying firms who get paid very well to craft messages and arguments for elected officials. If you've ever seen what a consulting company costs (hundreds of thousands of dollars for small projects), you'd realize most of that money is going to support lobbyist's lifestyles.
Complex matter. There is legitimate lobbying, which is for expert groups affected by s policy to make their position known. The issue is that the process favours big commercial players that can cough up the cash for long-term professional lobbyists. Consumer groups, NGOs, etc. mostly have to resort to signature campaigns etc.
But lobbying is helpful. Consider niche technical issue where maybe 3-4 organisations do reply have established expertise (because they are commercially engaged). There is often on specific policy no established evidence at the moment in time when government has to make a decision, nor is the way forward obvious. Thus it's a matter of hearing everyone concerned and finding a nuanced path forward.
Wonlobbying is legitimately useful. But what has totally spun out of control is the US lobbying machine (which sadly is spreading to other places), which really often is just bribery in many ways.
Well, say that I want to know if you are interested in golf. Do you prefer me asking if you can fill in a questionnaire, or should I just pop where you live and take pictures from inside your house?
You really don't have to play devil's advocate, one of them is illegal.
If a company has no viable way forward, and has to resort to what the rest of us deemed illegal, it should stop existing. Not all companies should survive at any cost, that's not utilitiatian or desirable.
Certainly, spying on someone's domicile is illegal. But it wasn't really the analogy I was going for.
I'm going to be purposefully obtuse and set up a contrived hypothetical, but to me it's really more like: you came to my store today, but I saw you at the golf shop yesterday. Maybe I watched you closely to learn exactly what you were thinking about buying. I happen to also sell golf things and maybe I want to peddle them to you. So I really go all in on my sales pitch and single you out while you're shopping. That's legal in meatspace. What makes "the same thing, but do it on a computer" illegal and unethical? I think it's a real important question for legislators to answer. Is it the scale? The fact that it can be automated? That we're really not actually comfortable with the meatspace example but didn't have a good way to ban it before?
Just food for thought. I'm mostly neutral on the GDPR, I appreciate the intention but I think we as a society need to define consistent expectations about privacy.
Google isn't following you, they're just in every store you walk into no matter what.
Imagine almost every store in your city installed something facial recognition (a la Amazon Go). This system, given to owners literally for free, was created by one company - Google - and allowed them to automatically see what products most people were looking at, what time they were doing so, and their demographic. As payment, Google also gets this data and is able to use it for their means.
Note: i'm just making this analogy. Google Analytics (probably) isn't being used for ad targeting.
I was careful to say only that I saw you at the other store rather than implying I followed everywhere, since that's a fair line to draw and I wanted to avoid that particular connotation. But even still, hiring a private investigator is not illegal - it's just observational.
What actually happens is that your behavior (in store or not) is permanently observed all the time and ads are served whether you want it or not.
Imagine if in all shops, always you'd get jumped on by attendant trying to sell you things. And sometimes shop attendant would appear out of the blue.
What you're describing you can have today - just convince user to make account in your shop and give you permission to send offers. You can chase him any time you want.
> Imagine if in all shops, always you'd get jumped on by attendant trying to sell you things. And sometimes shop attendant would appear out of the blue.
As opposed to the half of them where it currently happens?
That's the precipice of the argument though, right? It's not illegal to observe interactions that you witness, or take notes about customers you saw shopping your competition.
You could even hire someone to wander around your competing stores and take lots of notes about the people they saw. "Red shirt guy shopping around for slim fit pants". Unlikely scenario, but legal to do and to use that information.
My whole thing is - what makes the scenarios different enough that one is prohibited and one is allowed? Certainly if we told folks they must forget their observations about others upon request, that would face some baseline rebuttal about their own autonomy.
It wasn't necessary to make this behavior illegal before because it was impractical, but now that computers have made mass surveillance practical, it should be illegal.
I don't think anyone thinks the executives are unaware of what happened. OP was commenting on the optics of how Boeing is handling the situation. What I wish the public was discussing is accountability for their negligence, and a solution to avoid similar process failures in the future (and likely jail time for those responsible).
One could make the argument that the execs didn't know until after the first crash. But they definitely knew by the time the second one crashed. They had months to do something and did nothing.
There are few ways of dealing with the situation worse than the one chosen by Boeing, but late night tweets about "unscheduled meteoric burial" would be one of them.
Which is a blatant lie considering they opted to DLC bunch of saftety features.
If you're referring to the AOA indication — they didn't though. Boeing sold the MAX to the FAA and the airlines as being equipped with an "AoA disagree" annunciator on every single one. It turns out that the annunciator didn't work unless you also purchased the AoA gauges (it's unclear to me whether or not there are gauges on the primary flight display or if they're just part of the heads-up display). That little glitch was considered too minor by Boeing to notify the FAA or the airlines.
It’s really worse, since the aircraft was advertised as having the critical safety feature but in reality it required the DLC. So pilots could well have assumed there would be a warning.
I don't think the AoA disagree indicator is particularly useful without an AoA gauge to at least see which side has a plausible number.
On the 737MAX the indicated airspeed is calculated from the pitot tube reading and the AoA reading, so you'll already get an airspeed disagree warning. And the stickshaker on the side(s) with the broken sensor will also be going, if it uses the bad data to compute a stall.
Another warning doesn't help Lion Air when they don't know the computer is adjusting the trim, even though autopilot was disabled because of airspeed disagree.
Another warning doesn't help Ethiopia Airlines who don't have a procedure that gets the trim back under control.
What Boeing needed to do was tell pilots about MCAS -- training, as well as an indicator that it activated; and provide a way to disable it while still providing pilot control of trim.
Did they consider it minor even AFTER the first crash? I think even if you accept that such a glitch was overlooked prior to the Indonesian crash, it is hard to see the justification for continuing to withhold this and other information related to MCAS after the first crash - which - remember - was very much related to the AoA indicator.
Having lived through a hyperinflation, I would not have touched Bitcoin with a ten foot pole. You want a rock stable foreign currency when the times are hard, not something that can push you even lower due to loss of even the minimal resources that you have.
They're math operations on small vectors of 32-bit floating point numbers, they produce same result given same input data.
The only difference is that CPU computes stuff on 4-wide vectors of these numbers (modern CPUs up to 16), that GPU on 32-wide vectors (other modern GPUs up to 64).
A lot of the FLOPS on newer CPUs are like GPUs, yes.
But the comparison is against an old CPU, without big vector units.
Those non-vector calculations are very different, and far more flexible.
A brand new CPU core can do 3-4x as many separate operations per cycle, and is clocked 6-10x as fast.
Having more cores helps but it's still far behind.
Also for a fair price/performance ratio you probably want to compare to the 450MHz model at $230, so only a $350 CPU today ($280 equivalent by august). https://money.cnn.com/1999/08/23/technology/intel/
For example, GPUs are better at vectorized condition code. CPUs were mostly fixed with AVX512 but these instructions are too new, only available on some servers.
Sure, there’re algorithms which don’t work on GPUs. A stream cipher would be very slow because requires single-thread performance, also GPUs don’t have AES hardware. A compiler is borderline impossible because inherently scalar and requires dynamic memory. Also GPUs don’t do double-precision math particularly fast.
Still, I think many users who need high-performance computing can utilize GPUs. They’re trickier to program, but this might be fixable with tools/languages, we have been programming classic computers for ~70 years, GPGPUs for just 12.
> For example, GPUs are better at vectorized condition code.
That's throughput, not flexibility. I would define flexibility in terms of how easily the instruction stream can vary per math operation. Full flexibility requires a lot more transistors per FLOP, which is why you can't use wildly different architectures to assess Moore's law, which is about transistor count.
And comparing transistors on Pentium 3 (including cache) to an RTX 2060 (including cache) it seems to be 34 million vs. 10800 million. That's two and a half orders of magnitude.
I read this analysis that before the Dotcom bubble burst, unicorns cashed out in a similar fashion. The authors were proposing to watch for the next wave as an indicator, as VCs would be trying to cash at the best time (or at all) before a recession.
This hopefully shouldn't be a surprise for those looking to invest in the public stock market, given the ample amount of caution many participants have been expressing over the last 12+ months regarding our current status of being in the late stages of economic expansion.
This will be known as the everything bubble, everyone saw coming. I don't think anyone's going to be surprised when this melt down arrives. Though the length of recovery needed to bounce back will surprise people who haven't been watching the public/private US/Global deficits over the last 20 years.
Not really; there isn't the irrational exuberance that the dot com, housing, or bitcoin bubbles had. There aren't stories about people getting rich quick, new normals, etc.
> ...deficits over the last 20 years.
You're onto something here. There's definitely been an increase in government spending. The other thing going on is that there was a lot of quantitative easing following 2000 and 2008. There's another word for everything going up: inflation. Maybe that's what we're seeing, but government inflation metrics are missing it for some reason.
Citing shadowstats is not really a good sign in any argument. Even if they might have a point, the whole site is not about that point.
The changes in CPI calculation (continuous consumer basket adjustment, etc.) are well documented, well known in econometrics, and is considered a sane thing. (After all you can't really equivocate a TV from the 50s and a TV now.)
And while it's always possible to make better adjustments, shadowstats does not argue for this, it just argues against a strawman conspiracy.
"For example, a can of tomato sauce that cost $.25 at Piggly Wiggly in 1982 cost $.79 at my local market in early 2015. Starting from the 1982 price, the CPI predicts that it should cost $.61 in 2015 while ShadowStats predicts that it should cost $2.64. Starting from the 2015 price and working backwards, the CPI predicts that it should have cost $.32 in 1982 while ShadowStats predicts that is should have cost $.08. Based on these calculations, we see that the CPI underestimates inflation, as measured by the Tomato Sauce Index: The ratio of the 2015 predicted price of $.61 to the 2015 actual price, $.79, is .77, an underestimate of 23 percent. The ratio of the ShadowStats prediction to the actual price is 3.32, an overstatement of 223 percent. For tuna, both indexes overestimate inflation, the CPI by 34 percent and ShadowStats by 478 percent, and so on."
And to address the "they miss it part". Well, probably most people don't buy stocks, and most people don't buy private equity limited partnership chunks, so ... CPI-U does not measure "asset bubbles".
I'd like to think that the US government changed the what it's measured because of changes to how the economy works (this is especially important for GDP calculations) and improved understanding of inflation. Doesn't mean that's the case, but I don't buy that because a metric is what we used in the past it's inherently better.
The changes increased government revenue by pushing people into higher tax brackets and decreased government spending by reducing COLA adjustments on social security and government pensions. It's politically a lot easier to obfuscate inflation than explicitly raise taxes and/or cut spending.
> there isn't the irrational exuberance that the dot com, housing, or bitcoin bubbles had.
I would counter that by saying that throwing money at companies that literally say they may never be profitable (Lyft, Uber), and valuing them at insanely high amounts is pretty irrational.
Depends on how likely that is. Uber and Lyft choose not to be profitable. Unless demand is so elastic that cutting R&D and raising fares to cover costs never breaks even (the pets.com scenario), there are some big levers for making those companies profitable.
Granted, they could still be profitable and overvalued.
CPI does not contain investment vehicles (stocks, equity, bonds).
The problems we are seeing are very much socially driven (emptying of middle income jobs -> lower pressure in low income jobs -> increasing poverty -> no money for education and healthcare spending -> low income stressed disabled people turn to high-risk high-yield activities drugs & crime). Coupled with the current populist politics, it's no wonder the "economic outlook" is a bit gloomy.
> Not really; there isn't the irrational exuberance that the dot com, housing, or bitcoin bubbles had
> There's definitely been an increase in government spending.
Perhaps the government spending is the irrational exuberance this time.
Who says there has to be a meltdown? We could just have stagnation for a long time. The policies may allow for poor allocations of resources to persist, leading to a stagnation in total productivity and in the median standard of living. See, e.g., USSR 1964-1987, or Japan recently.
> Though the length of recovery needed to bounce back will surprise people who haven't been watching the public/private US/Global deficits over the last 20 years.
The US gov has had large deficit spending equivalent to 3-4% of GDP per year for the last 20 years, and yet GDP per capita has only increased 1% per year. That's pretty darn bad. That's like driving your car petal to the meddle and only managing 21mph.
It might not be so bad if it was just the US. But, most of all the major countries in the world all have a similar problem with deficits: France, England, Japan, and even China. All of their debts (public + private) are about 200% of GDP and over. But, what's most striking is the difference between 1980 and today. That massive increase shows that the level of spending we're accustomed to is not sustainable.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=H04&yea...